Inflexible bureaucracy, top-down management, tightly regulated industries, monopoly - these are the tired remnants of the old corporate world order. The new economy demands new thinking, Yet the why-fix-it if-it-ain't-broken attitude often prevails among CEOs who are too myopic to notice that the market has evolved, let alone to envision how it will look in five years. So change often comes from within, from independent thinkers who see old problems with new eyes.

Those who break the shackles of business as usual - Corporate Rebels - set the pace for the next millennium. They are iconoclasts who question the status quo, cut through red tape, and challenge their bosses to greatness. Not all succeed and some flee to become entrepreneurs. But the smarter companies tap the uprising within, creating ways to turn the steam of the rebel into the fuel that drives the business.

Rebel Without A Pause

by Steve G. Steinberg

His arms gesticulate spastically and his head keeps bobbing and flicking between his visitor and every item that comes into view as he races down the hushed hallways of the IBM Almaden Research Center.

He's fumbling over his words, changing the subject every few seconds, then backing up, finally throwing out his hands and letting go a staccato burst of laughter before launching into a story about a cocktail party, someone named Lou, and a computer you wear on your belt.

At this point, the visitor is so convinced that Ted Selker seems too, well, flaky, to be a real scientist - he's not calmly staring off into the middle distance, loosely holding an uncapped marker in one hand, preparing to record the next flash of inspiration like others at Almaden - that it takes a minute to connect "Lou" with Lou Gerstner, IBM's CEO. And then the visitor starts wondering: How the hell did this maniac become so important to a staid corporation like IBM?

Corporate R&AMPD labs have always been a dumping ground for misfit technogeeks. If they are a bit weird, so much the better. They can be shown off every quarter or so when the CEO takes investors on a tour of the lab: "Yep, we have some brilliant researchers here. Just look at Ted! He's almost as crazy as Einstein!"

Selker, 41, seems like a natural for this role. His angular face is framed by his annual winter beard, and he's breathtakingly smart, with an appropriately esoteric academic background. As an undergraduate at Brown University in 1978, he built an electronic simulation of how the eye focuses and then went on to study brain modeling and AI at the University of Massachusetts and Stanford. In his spare time, Selker used his restless energy to climb peaks like the 20,702-foot Chimborazo in Ecuador and to carve a 6-ton oak sculpture.

He worked at Atari's think tank during its heyday in the early 1980s and moved over to Xerox PARC in 1984. Both labs were full of rebels who invented brilliant things and ... were ignored!

But Selker has managed to break that pattern. You know the little red positioning button used on the ThinkPad? That's his. Called the TrackPoint, it is the biggest improvement in pointing devices since the mouse. IBM tripled its notebook production every month for four months after the TrackPoint arrived. Two other IBM notebook PCs introduced without a TrackPoint were both discontinued.

Selker never really fit in at Atari or Xerox. So in 1985, when IBM asked him to join its T. J. Watson Research Center, he accepted. "I wanted to show I wasn't a flake," he says. He wound up joining as a lowly advisory programmer because he didn't have a PhD, and he kept getting slapped down by management. But he was starting to learn a few tricks for getting his way within the IBM bureaucracy.

One day, Selker noticed that people were slowed down by always having to reach for the mouse. If some kind of joystick device could be integrated with the keyboard, then users could keep typing. Selker experimented with different tracking algorithms and created hundreds of plastic mock-ups, finally ending up with a stubby plastic shaft that fit between the keys.

Now came the hard part: to have his pointing device used in one of IBM's laptops, he had to win over Satoru Yamada, the IBM Japan engineer heading up that research. Satoru wanted an alternative trackball device and objected to Selker's TrackPoint because it left an imprint on your finger. That was ridiculous, thought Selker. It was like criticizing a Ferrari because the clutch was
stiff.